With a Left to the Heart

I’m amused by the disgust that swept the country when Mike Tyson took a bite out of Evander Holyfield’s ear. Even Bill Clinton was horrified.

White House disapproval was followed by talk show expressions of repugnance, aversion, repulsion and loathing.

I received telephone calls from people who said it made them sick and who viewed with alarm the violence displayed that night in Las Vegas.

It made me wonder: Where in the hell have they all been?

It’s a violent world, folks. We strangle babies, shoot old ladies and stick knives into the hearts of strangers.

If all we did was bite off one another’s ears, I’d be the first to stand up and cheer. I can do without an ear. I can’t do without my life.

Boxing isn’t chess. It is not an undertaking limited to intellectual dexterity. The idea of boxing isn’t to achieve through knowledge. The idea of boxing is to smash faces, break noses and scramble brains.

Historically, this has upset only a very few. Big spenders paid up to $1,500 to see Tyson and Holyfield spatter the ring with blood and spit at the MGM Grand.

When voices are raised against boxing’s brutality, its defenders say: “Look at the positive side, we aren’t pitting gladiators against lions anymore. We’ve evolved. The human spirit glows.”

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I talked to Charlie Gergen about this. He’s a boxing trainer transplanted from Australia who cares more about people than about right jabs and considers Tyson about the lowest form of mankind.

Charlie started out tent-boxing in Sydney, taking on all comers off the street, sometimes four or five a night, giving more than he received, but still getting his nose broken 19 times.

Now at 57 he trains fighters in a small gym in Hermosa Beach. Sometimes he gets into the ring with kids who think they’re hotshots and knocks them on their cans just to show them they’re not. He’s tough, quick and doesn’t take a lot of crap from wise guys.

Charlie was in the ring when I met him, sparring with an off-duty Torrance cop training to take part in a police boxing match.

“I teach ‘em to hit and not get hit,” he said afterward, untaping his fists and expressing his philosophy of boxing in a thick Australian accent. “I say fight clean and win with honor. That’s the best way.”

Charlie is possessed with a kind of native goodness that makes him an anomaly in boxing. He helps the kids he trains get out of gangs and off drugs and sometimes lets them live at his place to avoid troubled households.

He believes in fairness and decency. You play by the rules, he’ll tell you. You don’t bite ears.

“What did everyone expect?” he responds when asked about the Vegas debacle. “Tyson’s an animal. He ought to be banned from boxing for a year. Anyone else would be banned for life. The guy brings boxing down.”

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Oakland was a big fight town once and I went to a lot of matches when I was a kid. Then I got to be a newspaper reporter and they let me sit ringside. I saw boxing up close. Too close.

A fighter was knocked out directly in front of me. His eyes were rolled back, his mouthpiece knocked away and his neck twisted at a funny angle. Blood and saliva drained slowly from his mouth. They carried him from the ring, his arms and legs jerking with convulsions.

The guy who put him there was in the center of the ring, both arms raised, jumping up and down, a triumph of strength over humanity.

The winner danced, the loser spent the rest of his days drooling and mumbling. But, hey, isn’t that what life is all about? You win you dance, you lose you die . . . in one form or another.

I stopped going to the fights after that and when I got to be a columnist in Oakland I was a loud voice against boxing. But now I’m older and look at life differently. I back away and study.

Maybe that’s why I wasn’t horrified, appalled, sickened or disgusted when Tyson took a bite out of Holyfield’s ear. I mean, look at us, America.

We’re awash in blood, insensitive to pain and entertained by violence. I can’t watch the 11 o’clock news anymore, and I wince at the casual exploitation of human agony on the big screen.

Is boxing violent? Hell, yes. But so are the streets of every big city in America. In its odd and ironic way, boxing represents a gentler time when debates were settled with fists. Now we settle them with guns.

Mike Tyson is a brutal, stupid man. But by biting an ear he may be telling us something about ourselves far more distressing than any pain suffered by Evander Holyfield. That horrifies me most of all.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com